11/13/2025
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, female vocalists in Iran have been banned from singing solo in public under the assumption that the musical feminine voice will corrupt society. Despite this repressive context, silence has never been the case and women have sustained their careers through a myriad of subversive strategies.
This talk explores these strategies through the career of Masoumeh Mehrali, a prodigy of the legendary Mohammad Reza Shajarian in the 1980s, whose story exemplifies the challenges of a master female vocalist sustaining a career without the privileges of prerevolutionary fame. Over the past forty-six years, in addition to establishing herself as master musician, she has also trained a new generation of female singers who continue to challenge the limits of the ban’s enforcement.
Payam Yousefi (PhD Harvard, 2023) is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Florida specializing in the intersections of music and politics in the Middle East and the US. Currently Yousefi is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Yale Department of Music and a Long-term Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. His book project titled, Subversive Sounds: Music and Authoritarianism in Modern Iran tells multiple stories of how Iranian musicians’ have transcended authoritarian controls over the past 19 years.
Thursday, November 20. RSVP at link in bio.
